The Future of Spree and the Future of Solidus

Oct 28, 2015 • Solidus core team

Spree Commerce, the company that has stood behind Spree OSS over the past years has announced that it will stop investing in the open source project and that there currently is no core team. We — the developers at Bonobos and Stembolt (formerly FreeRunning Technologies) — forked Spree and called it Solidus.

We believe that Solidus is the future of the Spree open source project and that it should power your production stores as it does ours. Why? Let’s look at some of the improvements we’ve already shipped:

Cartons, a representation of the actual package as shipped out by your warehouse

Stock transfers and a new stock management interface

Proper locking when updating orders through the API

Store credit

Multiple codes per promotion

Adjustment and return reasons

Item cancellations to better deal with short ships

More reliable, randomized specs with vastly reduced sporadic failures

Patched three critical security vulnerabilities which we also contributed back to Spree

Many other improvements and bug fixes

We run our stores on Solidus; bonobos.com and ayr.com are powered by the head of our master branch. This helps explain our vision for this project:

Stable, high-quality code: Nothing gets into master until it has two thumbs from core contributors who feel confident that it is production-ready code.

Easier upgradeability: We take great care to either make changes backwards-compatible or to clearly document breaking changes. We want you to always run on our latest version.

Better extensibility: We are adding specific, well-documented extension hooks for which we can better achieve API compatibility. This is a work in progress but our goal is: no more class_eval.

But don’t take our word for it: Check out our GitHub page. You’ll see an active community and a stable core team of six — John Hawthorn of Stembolt even works on Solidus full-time. There are lots of great-quality pull requests — from Bonobos (12 developers) and Stembolt (17 developers) as well as from the wider community. You’re also invited to join our discussions in our public Slack channel.

As excited as we are about the future of Solidus, we are enormously grateful to Spree Commerce and all the developers that contributed to Spree over the years. Solidus would not be possible without their help. Thank you!